Okay, so, been poking around in blogland today- here and there as it were- and nobody has kicked my brain topic wise, but the over all feel of shit I have taken a look at today has…hence, see title of post. Now, I will say frankly, that despite my actual dislike of them-in any flavor, color, or gender- I know a lot about various extremists. I would even guess anyone who has lived/lives in the South who ISN’T one has looked into it a bit, cause you are gonna get accused of being one regardless. Thusly, admittedly, what I know most about is white extremist groups. Hell, I talked a guy outta Norse Tattoo he wanted because I was pretty dang sure this fellow did NOT want to be mistaken for “one of those guys”. But in looking around, hell, you ain’t gotta go to extremist sites to see extremist shit, because all you need to do to find it is look at any hardcore rad fem or MRA site and BOOM, plenty of it, right there. And sometimes the stuff both are saying makes sense (just like any extremist site). Any extremist can and WILL find proof of shit that will back up what they say. It’s actually NOT that hard really. I mean a rad fem can say that women are far and away more often victims of sexually based crimes than men, and far more often those who commit such crimes are men, and they would be right. MRA sorts can say that men are far and away more often victims of paternity laws which are skewed in womens favor, and they would be right. And a sorta tit for tat can be engaged in endlessly….slut shaming vs trauma in wars, DV vs Police Brutality, so on, endlessly….everyone does in fact have a leg to stand on with regards to their views...just like white extremists, or black extremists or christian, jew or muslim extremists…they can, with fact, back their shit up.
What makes them extremists, however, and what fucks their shit up, is that they tend to apply it to everybody. All men. All women. All non-white folk. All white folk. All non (insert religion here) folk. All of ’em. Period. There is no room for exceptions to THEIR RULE when, well, MOST people ARE exceptions to it. I mean, all men are sexual predators? Actually, the real unbiased proof suggests all men aren’t. All women seek to control men’s sexuality? In fact, no, most women don’t. All white folk are racist? Humm, considering Obama is President, I think maybe that ain’t really the case. All black folk are violent thugs? Uh, no, in fact, most of them are not. All muslims want to blow stuff up? Uh, no, most of them don’t. All Christians want to forcibly bring everyone else into the fold? Um, no, not really- and even amid the Christian Religions, there is a ton of variety (come on, I dare ya to tell a staunch Baptist and a staunch Catholic they are exactly the same…) all Jews support Israel and secretly are working to bring the world under a Zionist State? Goddamn, where is my memo! Ernest, did YOU get a memo? Oh, wait, I’m not ALL jew, so, maybe I didn’t get one….I’ll call my dad and see if his arrived in the mail yet…I mean, he’s been lookin’ for it for the last 70 years, right? And they all predict stuff…kinda like folk of a certain age, hell, generations from mine back through my parents, really, say anyone between late 30’s and 70’s even, depending on what side of the Iron Curtian they lived on, were kinda convinced everyone on the other side of it wanted ’em dead, in the big Cold War cap vs com drama that had many of us diving under our desks in school for air-raid and nuke drills. Guess what? I reckon, and fact will actually prove, that most folk on either side of that curtain, cap or com, had no desire to hurt/kill/go to war with/nuke anyone. But every extremist NEEDS a boogy man, and unfortunately they are not too hard to find. Every rad fem can find a violent rapist or serial killer of women, every MRA can find an abusive mother, every white hate monger can find a gang banger, every black extremist looking for a horrible racist can find a Grand Wizard, and every major religion has some less than stellar moments and figures…there are plenty of examples out there that back up an extremist view….
But they are never the majority. They are a minority used to paint the rest of whatever group the extremist hates. A simple fact is, by chemical make up and biology- we ARE pretty much all the same. So hating on someone for a chromosome difference, a skin color difference, a regional difference, a religious difference- when so much else is exactly the same…it’s extreme, and actual proof? It won’t ever be on your side. I mean, at least here in America, you can hate whoever you want…I will admit I dislike rich classist assholes a whole lot…but I cannot actually prove they are baseline different from me or out to get me, so proof ain’t on my side either- and my dislike is prolly irrational on many levels….but at least I admit it. And they are not a majority….
In fact, I think if hardcore haters of any type said I hate men who sexually assault women, or women who cheat men, or violent gangsters, or racist asshats, or terrorists, or aggressive religious sorts, so on…no one would think of them as hardcore haters at all, but people who dislike violent lying hate and fear mongering jerkwads….
Eh, something to ponder anyway…
Renegade Evolution 
It’s just incredibly sad and pointless. Why?
I wish to hell I knew…
I think it’s because people believe that (pardon if I’m scattered, this thought is formulating) if you are DIFFERENT (race, color, creed, preference, whatever) then you automatically believe they are WRONG…I have kinfolk like this. Different= Bad. It is also far easier to apply Bad Quality X to all members of a group (all men are rapists, all women are manipulators, all blacks are thugs) than it is to look at each individual and judge them on their own merits. People are lazy, you see. Well, generally speaking…not all of us.
Oh, I have racists in my family too, and you can talk to some of them until you are blue in the face and they don’t hear anything they don’t want too…
Um, I live in the South (New Orleans LA and Bay St Louis MS) but do not know any extremists as described above. Of course New Orleans may be the North Caribbean more than the American South, and the Gulf Coast has been Jimmy Buffetted into stoned shrimp-pink mellowness. Uptowners, including some of my family members, can be a bit racist, and I have made special efforts to introduce them to my black colleagues and confreres, especially to outstanding youth leaders who have done so much for the recovery of New Orleans. The family racists’ position is not that all black people are bad but rather that lots of black people are good but what are we going to do about the terrible, violent, ghetto-dwelling ones? This may be myopic, but it is not extremist in the totalizing way you describe. As for me, I am completely enlightened and tolerant of all peoples and nations, excepting only Sweden. I imbibed with my Danish mother’s milk the knowledge that Swedes are evil and must be suppressed. That is not extremism, just good sense.
As i have said, New Orleans is its own special world, really. I reckon you don’t have skinheads and such roaming around in New Orleans. Other places? A yep….and not just the south by ANY stretch of the imagination…Oregon and Ohio are popular with the white hate types as well.
We got em in droves here… but lots of em are conspiracy theorists… I already posted here about the chemtrails: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemtrail_conspiracy_theory
That is the kind of thing I hear about. The government is trying to poison and/or neuter us or turn us into mindless enslaved drones.
In the Margaret Atwood novel I just read (Year of the Flood) the agent of our destruction is in a sex supplement called “BlyssPlus”… I was surprised at how similar the idea is, to what my local extremists say… (GREAT BOOK, BTW, just blogged about it)
Like you say, plenty of truth in the idea that drugs can be dangerous, even the “good ones”… and its a short leap to saying that they might be dangerous *on purpose* so Big Pharma can then sell you their handy-dandy cure. But if you think that about EVERY drug or EVERY medical procedure, you will go insane… or at least may become very ill.
I know at least two of these extremists who died rather than go to a hospital for something treatable.
That’s one of the sanest things I’ve seen on the Web. Surprising that the yokels are not even now storming Castle Ren with pitchforks firebrands and bibles. Came at the right time too considering what’s just happened in Norway where it’s hard to imagine that their ancestors were the terror of the Atlantic for centuries. You should have seen the ‘terrorism experts’ working their way round to how this told Nordic speaker of perfect Norwegian could still be part of ‘international’ (ie Muslim) terrorism. Calling him a ‘Christian extremist’ hasn’t led to the same outrage against Christianity. More, it has led to an outrage at calling him ‘Christian’ – whatever he calls himself. No surprise.
But why? “They hate our freedoms” In some cases maybe: the very existence doing haters don’t like calls their beliefs into question – if ‘God hates fags’ then letting soldiers on active service in a war zone get killed is a pretty lame way of showing it. Marxists would say the ruling class encourages the subordinate class to fight itself so it won’t unite against it. Some truth there too. Fear is a big and nicely circular one too – even the good ones are still ‘them’ so don’t trust them – leading to the ‘good ones’ feeling that maybe the ‘bad ones’ have some argument on their side after all. When the vigilantes do come after you just because you are one of ‘them’ do you turn to the cops from the same background as the vigilantes or to your own bad boys?
ahem, I am a yokel. But not an idiot. Shrug.
I get judged a lot as a bad sort for a whole lotta reasons, some legit, some not at all, and even with that in mind, I do not see judging ANY group by the actions of one person as anything other than stupid and lazy.
There’s more sense in the Bible than people like to admit and “Judge not, lest ye be judged” is some of it. Those quick to denounce usually show their own refusal to actually look at a view instead of find a way to make it fit their superficial prejudgments. A lot of people (especially the kind with strong views) think that if it’s right to dislike what is ‘wicked’, then anything they take a dislike to must be ‘wicked’.
Taking the middle ground of reasoned sense is more often an invitation to get bombed from all sides than to reconcile them. Like when the French Revolution ran out of seriously bad aristos they started executing people for ‘Moderatism’. Take comfort, that I am quite sure that as many consider you ‘a bad sort’ for whatever X their pet hate is, as their opposites are as ready to damn you as the arch-enemy of X-ness.
I wish this had a post-posting edit facility because “told Nordic speaker” should read “tall Nordic speaker” (they gave him as 1·9M = 6’2″) and “the very existence doing haters don’t like” is badly written anyway but should read “their very existence, doing what the haters don’t like”
PS I thought it worth putting a link up in the hope of starting a general discussion on hate & terrorist groups http://jincin1000.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=mental&action=display&thread=3814&page=1
I don’t know whether that part of the board is open or not. She closes parts to limit hits and that limits the amount of advertising.
Well, In New Orleans we have gutter punks – that’s about as close as we get to skinheads. But any similarity is only aesthetic, not political or social. There is David Duke, of course, who gave up a promising career in the Ku Klux Klan to become a race-baiting Louisiana politician. He now claims to live across Lake Pontchartrain from us in Mandeville LA, though there is evidence that he actually is resident in Austria. He would be a pretty scary guy if he were not such a fool. A few years ago, one of his campaign managers was quoted as saying “The Jews just aren’t a big issue in Louisiana. We keep telling David, stick to attacking the blacks.” Oy gevalt!
The family racists’ position is not that all black people are bad but rather that lots of black people are good but what are we going to do about the terrible, violent, ghetto-dwelling ones?
That made me smile grimly, King Schwarz. And the answer of course is exactly what we do about terrible violent white people.
A few months back I spent ages on another blog arguing with someone who had written a piece saying ALL muslims were homophobic. Not some muslims, all of them, and produced a bullshit survey to back that up. I’m glad to say the majority of those who commented, like me, pointed out that opinions like this are simply thinly disguised racism. If an individual muslim is homophobic, then we deal with them in the same way as a non muslim who is homophobic. But people who want to get at muslims – particularly in Britain – usually want to get at them because they’re not white. The racism comes first, the justification is tacked on later. And they will argue until they are blue in the face this is in the essential nature of whichever group they’re attacking. I’d like to say it defies belief that people from a group who are themselves the subject of bigotry could carry on in this way, but sadly it doesn’t. Bigots come from all parts of society.
What I feel about hatred of this type is that the hatred comes first and the hater then looks round for an acceptable target. They may justify it as some kind of personal threat, but it’s really just hate.
WRT to the Norway shootings, I was struck (bearing in mind the horrible deaths of so many people, overwhelmingly children) by the way the media believed the bullshit piece of trolling put out by a jihadist group (one newspaper over here even said is was an ‘Al Qaeda’ attack). That may have just been sloppy journalism, but I do think it’s representative of an undercurrent of respectable Islamophobia I personally find terrifying (and not just because it turns out the guy who probably did this was islamophobic). This is how Nazi Germany started. Never forget.
The problem is the the “center” is usually corrupt, mindlessly conformist and elitist. In short, no less extreme than the extremists – with the added problem of consistently lying to the public. The “War of Drugs”, “War of Porn”, “War of Trafficing” all represent the centrist mindset that nefarious forces seek to undermine society. The Hay’s Office and Estes Kefauver’s comic book “investigation”, the Stonewall raid (back in the good ol’ days of Liberal Republican John Lindsey) were similarly centrist. It has been “extremist” Libertarians and Anarchists that have been working to rid the country of these. Both political parties just nuzzle up to the trough for the grants these wars generate.